[morriscode deliberate exploration: #1] Hello Erlang

Quick intro
I overthink stuff, often think "man I wish I was exploring more tech tools and speeding up as a developer"...

My 2x-ex-cofounder Aaron had a blog that really inspired me: peddles projects (see here)
I'm going to try it.

How it works
every day, 30 min

• select some pre-scoped project, with defined learning objective/deliverable
• 25 minutes: hack like heck
• 5 minutes: reflect 
  • did I meet the deliverable? 
  • what'd i learn
  • lingering questions & potential future projects

Why?

• gain ability to rapidly prototype 
• remove hesitation of jumping into new tools.
• get better at just working really fast in a short burst instead of over thinking 
• learn to scope out work into bitesized chunks
• learn to group existing projects together over time to solve bigger problems
• It embodies my "try it now and try it fast" mentality
• exploring various tools without overthinking may help me discover valuable paths and connections in my mind and in the existing world that I can connect later on and may have not done so b4.
• If I establish this habit of moving fast and diving into projects it may leak into my other work and accelerate me overall.
• If this 30min activity daily yields a 1% weekly compound growth on my ability to reason, and move forward on things, that's >50% yearly return, which is insane.

Aaron and I spoke yesterday about this.

I woke up today thinking:

"Hmm... should I try this? Maybe I'll reflect on Sunday and decide then. Need to scope it out after all."

No. Bad. hush OCD hush.

The point is to dive in.

"ugh... but I don't know... what if..?"

NO.

"but...?"

"Should I post this on my blog...? it's going to be so jank"

ahht aht. shhh. no think. just code

"ok here we goooo"

Morris-code #1: Jan 3, 2019: Hello Erlang

Aaron introduced me to functional programming. I never used it much and figure it's perfect for this blog series.  let's get a hello world program working.
outcome:

• build hello world program in erlang

learning objectives?

• meta: want to see how this deliberate exploration system works out for me. diving in NOW.

post mortem
did I meet the deliverable? (y/n) and why?
yes, was pretty straight forward getting the helloworld working.
tried to get further and print a variables contents to no avail
what I learned?

• erlang is compiled to bytecode for a virtual machine (kinda like java?)
• erlang is built for distributed fault tolerant systems

lingering questions/next step inspiration for future projects?

• whole point of erlang seems to be distributed message passing, so I'll perhaps create a program where messages are passed between 2 processes and printed out.

ok back tomorrow!